Re: Catching NForce2 lockup with NMI watchdog

From: George Anzinger
Date: Tue Dec 16 2003 - 12:30:29 EST


Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, George Anzinger wrote:


Hmm, you could have simply asked... ;-) Anyway, an inclusion is doable,
I guess.

I suspect I did, but most likey the wrong place. In any case, I would like to think that "read the source, Luke" is the right answer.


Certainly it is, but not necessarily the only one. ;-)


So, while I am in the asking mode, is there a simple way to turn off the PIT interrupt without changing the PIT program? I would like a way to stop the interrupts AND also stop the NMIs that it generates for the watchdog. I suspect that this is a bit more complex that it would appear, due to how its wired.


Well, in PC/AT compatible implementations, the counter #0 of the PIT has
its gate hardwired to active, so you cannot mask the PIT output itself. So the only other choices are either reprogramming the counter to a mode
that won't cause periodic triggers (which is probably the easiest way, but
you don't want to do that for some purpose, right?) or reprogramming
interrupt controllers not to accept interrupts arriving from the PIT.

Note that Linux may behave strangely then. ;-)

This is for the VST code where we want to stop the timer interrupts for a bit IF and only if we are in the idle task AND there are no timers to service, i.e. the interrupt would be useless. We don't want to mess with the PIT program as that would mess up the time when we turn it on again. So we just want to stop a few interrupts from time to time. We catch up after turning the PIT back on by using the TSC or pm_timer or some other source that keeps something close to reasonable time.


--
George Anzinger george@xxxxxxxxxx
High-res-timers: http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-res-timers/
Preemption patch: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml

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